Mexico ambassador denies violence is spilling into U.S.

WASHINGTON — Texas elected officials are “disingenuous or naive” to believe drug violence is spilling across the border into the United States, Mexican Ambassador Arturo Sarukhan said Friday.

In a wide-ranging interview at the Mexican Embassy in Washington, Sarukhan attributed the recent escalation of violence in Ciudad Juárez to desperate attempts by narcotics kingpins to protect their shrinking turf, praised the Obama administration’s attempts to clamp down on the smuggling of U.S. weapons to the Mexican cartels and denounced the murders of journalists who cover the Mexican government’s bloody war against the nation’s powerful drug cartels.

The Mexican envoy also disagreed with American politicians who call unauthorized immigration from Mexico a national security risk akin to “potential terrorists or transnational organized crime.”

Unauthorized workers are “a challenge to the rule of law,” he said, “but immigrants are not a threat to the national security of the United States.”

Sarukhan took exception to a letter written by Texas Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn to President Barack Obama this week declaring that “spillover violence in Texas is real and it is escalating.” In Austin, Texas Gov. Rick Perry also activated a “spillover violence contingency plan.”

And U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said in a letter to Perry on Friday that her agency is considering expansion of drone aircraft operations into West Texas.

“The term ‘spillover’ would, at least in my eyes, seem to be a bit of a false dilemma,” Sarukhan said. “You speak of ‘spillover’ as if you had the pristine waters of Alaska contaminated by the spill of the Exxon Valdez. That is, there was nothing there before the Exxon Valdez created the accident.

“To assume that in Texas there are no distribution networks, drug-traffickers don’t have safe houses, they don’t have banks, they don’t launder money, is disingenuous or naive at the least,” he told reporters and editors from the San Antonio Express-News and Houston Chronicle. “So ‘spillover’? They’re already there.”

Sarukhan said that future violence in Texas was theoretically possible “if the drug-trafficking syndicates decide to use San Antonio as their hub and local law enforcement step up their efforts to shut them down.”

“But that is not happening,” he added.

The ambassador said drug cartels had resorted to terror tactics in response to Mexican President Felipe Calderón’s sustained crackdown, the first of its kind in Mexican history.

“You’ve got a president in Mexico who’s finally decided to take them on,” Sarukhan said. “It’s as simple as that. ... To an action, there is always a reaction.”

On violence against journalists in Mexico, Sarukhan said the Calderón administration was deeply concerned, despite complaints from media watchdog groups that it has remained silent.

There have been 44 documented deaths of Mexican journalists since 1992, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

“The fact that the press that is covering drug-trafficking is being targeted by drug-traffickers to intimidate and silence is a huge, huge, challenge to fundamental liberties and a free press in a country like mine,” Sarukhan said.

Legislation has been passed and a special prosecutor appointed to address the issue of violence against journalists, he said.

“If our press is being muzzled, killed because they are exposing what these guys are doing, Mexico is the poorer for it,” Sarukhan said.

Amid the border violence, a high-level meeting between U.S. and Mexican officials is scheduled for Tuesday in Mexico City to assess a three-year program that provided $1.3 billion in funds to Mexico to battle against drug cartels. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Napolitano will lead the U.S. delegation to Mexico City to meet with their counterparts in the Calderón cabinet.

Mexican officials, as well as U.S. border lawmakers, have said equipment and training in the Mérida Initiative, signed in 2007 by Calderón and former President George W. Bush, have been slow in coming.

Last December, the Pentagon delivered eight Bell helicopters for surveillance, but four Blackhawk helicopters still haven’t been transferred to Mexican federal police. And the Mexican Navy still is awaiting two CASA aircraft, also used by the U.S. Coast Guard, for maritime surveillance over drug routes.

Sarukhan said the talks in Mexico City — and an upcoming state visit by Calderón in May — would focus on building a 21st-century border, keeping pressure on cartels and improving cities on both sides of the border by reducing demand for drugs and less on the military hardware that dominated the first agreement.

Sarukhan praised the Obama administration for tightening searches of Mexico-bound vehicles to slow the flow of “high-caliber and high-powered weapons ... that are coming in and feeding the drug syndicates.”

The ambassador also pledged to step up extradition of narcotics suspects for trial in the United States. He did, though, express dismay over the case of Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, who recently was sentenced in Houston to just 25 years in prison by U.S. District Judge Hilda Tagle after cooperating with U.S. prosecutors — despite a murderous reign atop the Gulf Cartel.

“I would have liked to have seen something more powerful than what occurred,” Sarukhan said.